Women admire a man’s strength rather than his beauty.  This statement is commonly made, and with truth, but, so far as I am aware, its meaning is never analyzed.  When we look into it, I think, we shall find that it leads us into a special division of the visual sphere of sexual allurement.  The spectacle of force, while it remains strictly within the field of vision, really brings to us, although unconsciously, impressions that are correlated with another sense—­that of touch.  We instinctively and unconsciously translate visible energy into energy of pressure.  In admiring strength we are really admiring a tactile quality which has been made visible.  It may therefore be said that, while through vision men are sexually affected mainly by the more purely visual quality of beauty, women are more strongly affected by visual impressions which express qualities belonging to the more fundamentally sexual sense of touch.

The distinction between the man’s view and the woman’s view, here pointed out, is not, it must be added, absolute.  Even for a man, beauty, with all these components which we have already analyzed in it, is not the sole sexual allurement of vision.  A woman is not necessarily sexually attractive in the ratio of her beauty, and with even a high degree of beauty may have a low degree of attraction.  The addition of vivacity or the addition of languor may each furnish a sexual allurement, and each of these is a translated tactile quality which possesses an obscure potency from vague sexual implications.[170] But while in the man the demand for these translated pressure qualities in the visible attractiveness of a woman are not usually quite clearly realized, in a woman the corresponding craving for the visual expression of pressure energy is much more pronounced and predominant.  It is not difficult to see why this should be so, even without falling back on the usual explanation that natural selection implies that the female shall choose the male who will be the most likely father of strong children and the best protector of his family.  The more energetic part in physical love belongs to the man, the more passive part to the woman; so that, while energy in a woman is no index to effectiveness in love, energy in a man furnishes a seeming index to the existence of the primary quality of sexual energy which a woman demands of a man in the sexual embrace.  It may be a fallacious index, for muscular strength is not necessarily correlated with sexual vigor, and in its extreme degrees appears to be more correlated with its absence.  But it furnishes, in Stendhal’s phrase, a probability of passion, and in any case it still remains a symbol which cannot be without its effect.  We must not, of course, suppose that these considerations are always or often present to the consciousness of the maiden who “blushingly turns from Adonis to Hercules,” but the emotional attitude is rooted in more or less unerring instincts.  In this way it happens that even in the field of visual attraction sexual selection influences women on the underlying basis of the more primitive sense of touch, the fundamentally sexual sense.